


between eternity and time (your consciousness and mine)

by sinkingsidewalks



Category: Figure Skating RPF
Genre: Angst with a Happy Ending, F/M, Fix-It of Sorts, I promise!!
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-02-11
Updated: 2019-02-11
Packaged: 2019-10-26 01:19:23
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,235
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/17736299
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/sinkingsidewalks/pseuds/sinkingsidewalks
Summary: All the ways they don’t work out and the one way they door: An incredibly unscientific exploration of the multiverse theory.





	between eternity and time (your consciousness and mine)

**Author's Note:**

> Massive thanks to Jan and Chrissy for looking this over and catching my stupid mistakes. Title is (altered) from Emily Dickinson's _Bequest_  
>  This is a work of complete fiction.

It always happens.

Always.

The earth orbits the sun. Liquid water freezes at zero degrees Celsius. 

They fall into each other, binary stars in a collapsing system, doomed either to consume one another or be flung from orbit, into the blackness of space, into solitude. 

But even though it’s destined to fall apart, it _always_ happens.

\--

Sometimes she’s eight and he’s ten and she’s standing at the old phone in the kitchen, twisting the cord around her fingers until the skin goes white from lack of blood, listening to multiple pitched voices over the line while Scott stutters through a break up. She tells him okay and hangs up the phone and yells down the basement stairs to where her mother is switching over the laundry that she only wants to dance. 

 

Sometimes he’s eleven, playing pick-up hockey with his older brothers and their friends, boys all bigger than him, the smallest with at least forty pounds on him. He plays like he’s the biggest guy on the team and he’s been around long enough that the older boys don’t hesitate to take shots at him. One of them trips him up, grabs the puck, and he crashes into the ice, pain splitting through his arm caught beneath him. The bone shatters. A surgery and two months of recovery later, he holds a lifelong grudge against the ice. 

 

Sometimes she’s ten and she pulls a smooth brown envelope from the mailbox. She holds the paper with reverence, feeling the glue in the seams, the marks where it was jumbled by the mailman and crammed into their little box. It’s big enough that she knows it’s an acceptance even before she carefully cuts the top open with the silver letter opener her dad keeps on his desk. She still screams when she reads the words anyway. 

She calls him later that day, her words tripping over themselves with excitement, as she explains that she got into ballet school. He congratulates her carefully, happy that she’s achieving her dreams. 

\--

Sometimes he kisses her the night after they’ve stood on a World Championship podium for the first time. She tastes like the minibar vodka they’ve been drinking and French music sung out over crackly rink speakers, the sharp carve of their blades in the ice as accompaniment. He wants to whisper the words into the warmth of her mouth, press them like ink into her supple lips, bleed them from his bloodstream to hers. But he stops himself. 

Even though he’s said them a hundred times before – more probably – she’ll take them as something different with his hands pulling her body into his, no ice beneath their feet. This kiss is no accident. No bump of his nose into hers. Not a result of the centrifugal force that pulls them into orbit around some hidden center. 

She scratches her nails into the back of his neck, through the base of his hair, and he loses all train of thought. 

 

It’s hardly more than months later when it falls apart. She lays out her lies in the passenger seat of his truck on a highway north – all the times she dismissed him when he asked if she was okay, the doctors’ appointments she said were overcautious, the physio she said was working. 

He grips the steering wheel, watching his knuckles turn white in his peripheral vision as he stares down the car in front of them. She talks all the way to the border but he stops hearing her words, the whispers he promised her – blanketed in darkness, cocooned in his bed, drying sweat making her skin glisten – fill his ears instead. 

 

He tells her he needs time to think it through. 

She goes into surgery. 

He goes back to Michigan. 

\--

Sometimes she falls in practice the first day they’re in Vancouver. She trips over her toe pick, her calves collapse beneath her and she catches herself on bare hands against the ice. 

It bites into her hands, aching and familiar. The cold has tried to grip into her hands more times than she can count. Each time digging a little deeper as she pushed herself up from falls or packed together snowballs after a wet early downfall. It was the sharp pain of her palm print pressed onto the glass of the car window, frost edging inwards that she’d scored her initials into with her thumb nail, as she fought with Jordan to see who could hold against the cold longer on a late night drive home.

She knows, like she’d known then, that she just has to wait for the numbness to take over from the pain, then she can last forever. Except it wasn’t forever, and now the frost bites, and freezes her blood still within her. 

 

She lays on her bed in the Olympic Village, the ribbon of her gold medal spilling off the nightstand, her head pillowed on his chest. Music pours through the walls from someone else’s room but the only rhythm she can feel is the steady rise and fall of his breath. 

Alcohol simmers beneath her skin, she can smell beer on his breath, but her mind is clear. It pulls only the tension from her spine, the ache from her muscles. She knows exactly what she’s saying when she whispers, “I can’t do it anymore.”

His lips press into her hair. “Okay, Tess.”

\--

She wakes up from surgery for a second time and for a second time he’s not there with her. The drugs quickly pull her back under, chase away her thoughts with violent dreams of broad stroke colour that she can’t surface from. Her mind swirls away from her, like the last dregs of water spiral down the bathtub drain. 

When she comes to he’s there but she doesn’t believe it. Waits for it to be a phantom of her addled mind, for him to slip through her fingers or disappear like a mirage on the horizon. But he’s there, on his knees at her bedside, his hand burning an imprint over the skin of her arm. 

“Tess,” he whispers, a prayer to a long forgotten god. She’s the only one listening. 

The lights are too bright, the machines beeping too loudly, for her to focus on anything but the haze trying to drag away her consciousness, but she manages to fumble thick feeling fingers into his, until he understands and weaves their hands together. 

His palm presses into hers and the nightmares stay at bay. 

 

He’s still there the next time she wakes, and the time after that when she finally manages to croak out his name and prove to herself that he’s not a morphine induced hallucination. She feels high off the wash of affection his presence brings her, then anxious about what that feeling means. He squeezes her hand back in response, then calls over a doctor who asks her questions, who pokes and prods at her. 

The doctor tells them that everything looks good, and if she keeps recovering they’ll release her by the afternoon. Then he leaves them, and she realizes they’re alone in the room. 

“Your mom’s just gone to get coffee,” Scott explains. 

“Mm, coffee,” she says.

“You can have mine.”

She shakes her head, nose crinkled, he drinks it white, without sugar. “French vanilla.”

He makes a face of distaste like she knew he would. “We’ll hit a drive-through on the way home.”

She likes the way it sounds in his mouth, the way his lips shape around _home_ , singular. She bets it would taste sweeter on his tongue than her favourite drink. 

“We can get Timbits too.” He moves a fallen strand of hair out of her eyes. “I won’t even complain when you eat all the chocolate ones.”

“They’re the best ones.”

 

He carries her up the stairs to her bedroom even though she insists she can walk. The pain meds are still going strong; she can hardly feel her body at all. Still, he wraps one arm around her waist, the other cradling her knees, a much weaker mimic of the lift they learned as kids. 

They spend the afternoon in her childhood bed, watching TLC on the TV he also carried up the stairs. She falls in and out of sleep to his running commentary on wedding dresses, her dreams filled with empty altars and aisles he stands at the end of. She doesn’t know which scares her more. 

 

By the time she feels properly awake, night has fallen and he’s gone to bed in Kevin and Casey’s old room down the hall. She takes her phone from the nightstand, texts him _come here_ , and hears his ringtone through the thin old walls a moment later. 

It’s less than a minute before the floorboard outside her door creaks and he’s easing the door open, whispering her name. 

“Come in.” 

“You okay?” He shifts on bare feet against the hardwood floor, wearing old sweatpants and a _Turin 2006_ t-shirt, his hair mussed on his head.

“Cold,” she explains, and as she says it she realizes it’s true. She’s tucked in under her duvet and winter quilt and she’s still shivering. 

“I’ll get you another blanket,” he says, retreating towards the door. 

“No,” she says, too loudly. They both freeze, waiting for the shifting sounds of one of her parents waking. It doesn’t come. She breathes out and shuffles over in her bed. “You’re warm.”

She thinks for a second that he might hesitate, that he’ll bring up the boundaries they adhere to, but he climbs under the covers with her without another word. She curls into his chest, warming her frozen hands by curling them around his shirt. He rubs her back gently as they settle themselves. 

“Go back to sleep, Tess.”

She feels him kiss her forehead and decides that in the morning, they’ll be friends again.

\--

He doesn’t mean for it to happen. There are lines they do not cross, carefully drawn boundaries they stay well within, rules they dare not break. They’re best friend, just best friends. They talk about everything, except the electricity that crackles between them off the ice as well as on. 

Except this program, it makes everything blur. 

They’ve done sexy before, a dozen times at least. They were doing sexy before they even knew what sexy was. But it’s different. It’s feeling the burn of her gaze scorch across the ice as she gets into character, it’s having her weight on his shoulders and imagining a different scenario where that could take place. 

They finish every run through and he feels exhausted, muscle sore, like usual, but also punch drunk, willing to make any stupid decision. 

Which is exactly what he calls it when he presses her into her locker in the empty change room after practice and kisses her like he’s drowning. She’s always been his salvation. 

 

He knows it’s a terrible idea, so does she, yet they keep falling back to it anyway. They fall back into so many old habits through the season, the kissing and fucking, the pain and the anxiety. 

 

They lose at Worlds, in London, and they sit on an empty locker room floor, virtually identical to the one they were in at the beginning of the season. He’s angry; she’s worried. It feels like fate. 

He says the thing he’s certain she’s thinking. “We’re better as friends.”

\--

Sometimes they win the Olympics, twice in four years. When they get home she doesn’t hear from him for four days. Then ten. Then a month.

She bumps into him a year later and remembers the feeling of her hand clasped in his, how his heart beat beneath her fingertips. She can’t tell if he’s thinking the same. 

\--

Sometimes he drinks away the taste of silver under his tongue. Burns his sense raw so that he can’t ever taste it again. The memory still lingers though, like split gums and a mouth full of blood, like new plastic – polymer and cheap paint – stinking up his childhood bedroom from the trophies lined up on one shelf. 

It’s still there when he kisses Kaitlyn.

It’s still there when he throws down half his winnings on a fixer-upper that should probably be torn down. 

It’s still there when he knows he’s too drunk to drive but does anyway and his car slides into a ditch full of melting spring snow practically in slow motion. 

He soaks his shoes all the way through climbing out of the driver’s seat but he doesn’t feel injured, only sober. The door slams shut behind him, cracking the cool night air, and he leaves it behind, listening to the water slosh in the fabric of his shoes as he walks down the deserted road. 

He ends up at Tessa’s. Because, he tells himself, it’s closest. Not because it’s been two weeks since they’ve spoken other than in brisk texts. By the time he gets there his shoes are almost dry. 

He rings the doorbell twice, leans against the railing of the porch, suddenly exhausted, and watches her peek out the front window, brushing the curtains to the side, to see who it is. Weakly, he waves one hand at her and a moment later she’s pulling the door open, halfway through saying his name in question.

“What are you doing here?” She stands in the doorframe barefoot, tugging a dressing gown around her but wide-eyed enough that he knows she wasn’t asleep. 

“Can’t I just stop by and visit my best friend?” He tries for a wry smile but can tell even before he sees it in her expression that he fails. Her brow furrows with concern – her thinking face, the one that makes an appearance for advanced math problems and deciding what donut she wants on cheat day. 

She shivers, belatedly, and ushers him in from the cold. 

 

“I miss you,” she whispers around tears that choke up his throat too. When he opens his eyes, letting the moisture slide down the side of his face into his hair, there are tears clinging to her lashes. 

He’s sprawled out over her couch, his head in her lap, ensconced by her warmth. He hadn’t made it any farther into the house before his collapse felt imminent. 

She blurs the tear track off his face with her thumb, leaves her cool fingers cupping his cheek, her fingertips brushing butterfly kisses into the tired bags beneath his eye. Her face is close enough that he can feel her breath wash over his lips and she still leans closer. 

She kisses him softly, chastely, a schoolgirl admitting a crush on the playground, a blushing virgin on her wedding night – cautious, testing, bearing all the weight alone. Her lips are weightless on his, ghostly, like a dream he’s had so many times before. 

His heartbeat stumbles onward. Her hair falls around them, the curtain drawn across the stage, reality non-existent behind it, nor fiction beyond the allowances of the plot. 

Familiarity hits him like a stone in the chest, knocking the wind from his lungs. The smell of her shampoo, the curve of her waist beneath his hands, the flutter of her lashes against his – each detail aches of days long gone, living memories he chases after as they slip beyond his grasp, never to be created again. 

She takes a breath against his cheek and pulls away. 

 

“Come on,” she says, and her whisper breaks the bubble open. She rises, holds out her hands to pull him up as well. “Your back will regret it if you spend the night on the couch.”

He blurs the tears out of his eyes with the heels of his hands, sits up even though it makes the dizziness overtake him, and follows her up to her room. 

They’ve shared a bed a hundred times before – as kids at sleepovers, anxious nights before competitions, just because one of them didn’t want to drive home. He figures – the spare toothbrush pressed into his hand, the old sweats left out on the end of the bed – that it’s no different now than it was then. She pulls him into her bed, tucks his favourite pillow beneath his head, and falls asleep without him.

 

He wakes before her, not a feat of any kind, with the taste of his stomach in his throat and a nervous energy beneath his skin. The kind that used to plague him on the days before a competition. But now there is nothing to be striving for. 

She’s woven herself around him in the night, one hand clutching into the fabric of his shirt, a leg slung over his. He extricates himself carefully but he need not, the steady rhythm of her breathing remains unchanged. The house is still dark as he walks through but he doesn’t need the light to know his way. 

He starts a pot of coffee in silent thanks and leaves before the sun rises.

\--

She kisses him on top of the Great Wall of China. 

They spend the walk up making the decision, going over every detail, every possibility and outcome, then they reach the top and the answer is yes. Yes, they want to skate again, yes, they want to compete. Yes, to early mornings and aching bodies and diet plans.

The countryside spills out below them, a view more literally breathtaking than anything she’s seen before. Around them fellow tourists chatter in languages she doesn’t know but she still feels isolated with him, swallowed by anonymity.

And she kisses him. 

One hand on the sweat slick back of his neck, the other planted on his shoulder, pressing up on her toes to reach his lips with hers. He startles, only for a moment, then he’s kissing her back and her stomach twists like it did when she was fifteen, like it does when she’s in love with him. 

She draws back to breathe, his forehead rests against hers, his hands cup her cheeks. They stay there for a moment, sharing a breath, until he leans back in and kisses her sweetly. 

“One last time for the road.” He whispers, wry smile covering his sadness. She draws away, swallowing her own ill-ease, knowing that the choice they’ve made is right.

\--

He shows up at her doorstep less than a year out from the Olympics, a bouquet of roses in his arm, rumpled with sweat from his morning run. She glares at him when she opens the door, still in her pajamas, her hair askew in a bun atop her head, but her expression morphs into confusion when she sees the flowers. He doesn’t feel so bad for waking her.

“I love you,” he says, breathless, before she can get a word out. “I’m in love with you, Tess. I have been since I was sixteen even if I wasn’t smart enough to see it.”

He looks at her, open, vulnerable, heart dripping off his sleeve. “I want to try. I want to make it work.”

She pulls him into her apartment by the hand, agreeing without ever saying a word. 

 

They lose the Grand Prix Final. The first loss in the comeback. He watches as she paces the hotel room, her brow furrowed, her lips moving silently. He knows what she’s telling herself. _It’s not a sign. We didn’t jinx it. The Olympics aren’t doomed._

He watches her worry, feels his own pooling dread at the possibility – that it’s all been for nothing, that the narrative is already written against them. But it’s not, he tells himself. Not if they’re consistent, not if they’re focused. It’s that thought which turns his stomach, all their energy needs to be fixed towards that one goal. They can’t risk it. 

He stops her, takes her arms in his hands, and bears the burden for them both. “It’s okay, Tess. I understand.”

\--

Since the scores were announced he’s felt like his heart is going to leap up out of his throat and spill all over her. He can’t stop looking at her, can’t stop touching her – gripping her fingers, leaving a hand on the back of her neck, tugging her into bone crushing hugs. He stumbles through family members and interviews in a daze, not quite believing it’s real, until she leads him back to her room and it’s quiet. 

The sudden stillness is almost as disorienting as the chaos. 

He holds on to her to ground himself, breathing in her familiar softness, the smell of her skin and sweat under the distant mask of soap. He presses a kiss to the hollow of her throat and feels her body shudder against his. They shift apart only far enough to match one another’s gaze. 

Her eyes look hazel in the darkness. 

He takes a breath, ready to lay everything on the line, to fall to his knees before her, heart in his hands, for her to accept or step on. It beats out her name in its two toned rhythm. 

She touches his chest. “After the Olympics.”

\--

Sometimes it really does happen after the Olympics. 

They sit in the stands of a darkened rink the night before tour, _their_ tour, _their_ dream. The one that they dreamed up and accomplished together. He holds her hand, and when she looks over she finds him staring at her. 

Her heartbeat stutters when she meets his gaze, his eyes are even deeper in the filtered light, and her whole being screams at her that this is her shot, and she needs to take it. 

She whispers, “Scott?”

“Yeah, Tessa?”

The formality of her full name startles her. He’s so fond of nicknames it almost never passes between them. _Tess_ always, _T_ often, sometimes _Virtch_ when he thinks he’s funny, but rarely _Tessa_. He uses it when he’s talking _about_ her, not _to_ her.

She loses her moment of bravery. Has only started to shake her head, to say _nothing, it’s nothing_ , without the words when he catches her jaw in his palm.

“What is it?”

She kisses him instead. Words have never been her forte. 

 

They make it through the prairie shows. Then the differences start leaping to the forefront. Petty squabbles like they’re teenagers again turn into stone cold silence. 

He loves her, she can tell, she can see it in every look, every kiss and heated touch, but if he keeps loving her like this she’ll lose him forever, and that’s one outcome she could never live with. 

\--

Sometimes he goes to her wedding. 

 

Sometimes she holds his newborn children in the crook of her arm but rarely are they her own as well.

 

Sometimes he holds her wrinkled hand in a hospital bed and waits with her while she drifts off into forever sleep. 

\--

Sometimes it takes them only two years longer than everyone thinks it does. 

She stands at her kitchen counter, trying to beat a lasagna into submission, when he crashes into her house, falling like dead weight onto the couch. 

“I’m dead,” he calls to her as she piles spinach and ricotta into the casserole dish. “You’ve gotta find a new partner for tour, these kids are kicking my ass.”

She laughs, drops the cheesy spoon back in the bowl, pulls a beer bottle from the fridge and goes to set it down on a coaster on the coffee table. He’s sprawled out on the couch, his legs falling off the side, still wearing his skating clothes. She tosses the TV remote onto his chest. 

“Buck up, Moir. Coaching eleven year olds isn’t harder than winning the Olympics.”

“But they have so much energy,” he whines, blinking up at her with puppy eyes. “And I’m _old_ now.” He looks down, surveying her apron and the pasta sauce on her wrist. “Are you cooking?” 

“Lasagna.” He looks weary. She rolls her eyes. “I precooked the noodles this time.” She goes back to the kitchen and adds the final layer of sauce and sheet noodles. “Are you away this weekend?”

“No,” he says, the TV flicks on.

She pauses, a handful of cheese frozen over the dish, certain that this weekend is one he’s meant to spend with her. “No?”

“No,” he repeats, voice casual. “We broke up.”

“What?” She dumps the cheese on and shoves the dish in the oven, then stalks back over to him. “When did that happen?” She bats his legs over and sits at the end of the couch. 

“A week ago.” He drinks his beer, she gapes. 

She snags the bottle from him and takes a sip. “What happened?”

He shrugs, holding meaningful eye contact. She almost doesn’t breathe, trying to talk herself into believing that she’s wrong. “I realized it wasn’t what I wanted.”

“Oh.” She says, and thinks about the past week. How he came along to her Pilates class, the nights he stopped by with coffee and her favourite donut when she was up late studying, the morning he bribed her out to the rink early then made pancakes in her kitchen afterwards. Oh. 

He raises one eyebrow, a question, and she can’t help the grin that blooms over her face. She nods quickly, he grins back, agreeing. A commercial shouts out of the TV. 

She jumps up from the couch. “I didn’t set the timer.” 

He calls into the kitchen, “In case you were wondering, it’s you, you’re what I want.”

“Yeah, I got that.”

**Author's Note:**

> Thanks for reading! If you want to find me on tumblr I'm @sinkingsidewalks there as well. And if you want you can also check out my other tumblr @vmficcatalogue which is an attempt at organizing fics!


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